New Trailer for The Forest Just Ain’t Right in a Lot of Good Ways

It starts out pretty enough. You’re walking through the forest looking at the wildlife, letting a bird land on your finger like you’re some kind of Disney princess, chopping trees and working the land, building warning signs out of the body parts of your slain enemies and setting them alight, and then it all goes horribly wrong. Or maybe it went wrong a little earlier during the “body part warning sign” bit. Either way, there’s something fantastically bad happening in The Forest, and its new trailer isn’t subtle about it.

Basically, The Forest is another sandbox survival game, but sets itself apart from the genre by ditching the blocky look entirely and taking place in a hand-crafted, rather than randomly generated, world. The tranquil moments of survival and beauty will be offset by the hideous violence of the nights, when Mutants roam the land looking to chow down on a hearty meal of long pig. The developer has said they’re taking their inspiration from 1970’s Italian horror movies, so despite the lovely moment with the bird in the trailer below things are going to get very nasty, very quickly. (Hopefully not Cannibal Holocaust levels of nasty, though. That might be a bit much.) The Forest is still slated for an early alpha by the end of the year, but in the meantime here’s a video that’s equal parts beautiful and brutal.